All The Tropes:Clear, Concise, Witty

The platonic ideal for trope-naming. These are to trope names much as Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are to Artificial Intelligence:

  1. The name of a trope must be clear, so that readers can intuitively guess the definition at a glance;
  2. The name of a trope should be concise, so long as conciseness does not conflict with clarity, defined above;
  3. The name of a trope should aim for witty, provided it does not conflict with either of the first two.

The specific order of these items is very important: Names that fail in clarity will attract misuse more often than names which are overly long (but clear), or so clinically devoid of humor that it should be a crime. It's no mere hyperbole, either, but a proven fact—renames are proposed (and evaluated) on the grounds of active misuse or misleading titles more often than any other criterion.

That said, we also acknowledge that sometimes a good trope name can fail to meet these requirements. It's an undeniable fact that many legacy trope names did—but it's also a fact that some of those names are now practically standard terminology not only within the troping community but in the literary/writing world at large. We're not going to be annoying pedants and reject a good name just because it doesn't fit these rules. But try to follow them, anyway.

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